Indian Scientist Rongmon Bordoloi Leads Black Hole Research In Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"Ever since then, the black hole has just been eating snacks."

A young scientist from Assam, who was awarded NASA's Hubble fellowship in 2015, has led breakthrough research that for the first time has been able to predict when the black hole's "last big meal" took place. Rongmon Bordoloi's team from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) found that the black hole "ate its last big meal about 6 million years ago, when it consumed a large clump of infalling gas."

"For the first time, we have traced the motion of cool gas throughout one of the bubbles, which allowed us to map the velocity of the gas and calculate when the bubbles formed," said Bordoloi in a press statement. "What we find is that a very strong, energetic event happened 6 million to 9 million years ago. It may have been a cloud of gas flowing into the black hole, which fired off jets of matter, forming the twin lobes of hot gas seen in X-ray and gamma-ray observations."

"Ever since then, the black hole has just been eating snacks."

Bordoloi, who hails from Jorhat in Assam, is one of the 17 scientists selected for the Hubble fellowship. He has a PhD in Physics from ETH Zurich.